Friday, January 23, 2009

I recently read a report from ComScore entitled How Online Advertising Works. It was enlightening to say the least and it supplied lots of basic information that people are pining for. Here are some basic nuggets you might need to whet your appetite:

According to Doubleclick and eMarketer, click-rates on static display ads fell dramatically in recent years to average levels of only 0.2% in 2006

Rich media ads don’t perform much better, with a click-through rate of roughly only 1% in 2006,according to research from Doubleclick, eMarketer, Eyeblaster and ABI.

Recent research conducted by comScore on behalf of Starcom and Tacoda showed that average click rates on display ads in 2008 were less than 0.1%. Further Starcom research suggests no correlation between display ad clicks and brand metrics, and shows no connection between measured attitude towards a brand and the number of times an ad for that brand was clicked.

The research suggests that when digital campaigns have a branding objective, optimizing for high click rates does not necessarily improve campaign performance.

The comScore research also revealed that two-thirds of Internet users do not click on any display ads over the course of a month and that only 16% of Internet users account for 80% of all clicks.

ComScore’s research also showed that the demographics of clickers are skewed towards younger users aged 25 to 44 earning less than $40,000 per year. This is hardly an attractive target segment for most advertisers.

Even search ads, presumably the most effective form of online marketing, are only clicked on 4% of the time at Google, and 2% at MSN and Yahoo!, according to comScore statistics.